The A9 Home and the Iyonix both have USB ports fitted as standard, whereas you can buy an optional USB card for Risc PCs. This page aims to provide some additional technical information as well as speed tests so that you can compare the various interfaces.

The A9 Home

The A9 Home is fitted with USB hardware which supports the USB 1.1 standard, although there is some (software) support for USB 2, but this can lead to confusion, so it's best to class the A9 as having USB 1.1

The Iyonix

The original Iyonix has USB 2.0 hardware built-in. However, early machines only supported USB 1.1 with a software upgrade to USB 2.0. Newer machines and all current machines come with full support for USB 2 built-in as standard.

Speed Tests

I hope to upload some detailed speed tests in the very near future (early Dec 2007) as soon as I've managed to perform comparative tests on the various different hardware combinations. In the meantime, using a 128MB USB 2 (Hi-speed) pen disc (made by Alcor Micro Corp.), a quick ballpark is that the Iyonix USB 2 runs at approx 2.5-3.0 MBps compared to the A9 USB 1.1 running at approx 250 KBps, which makes the Iyonix approx 12 times faster than the A9 Home.

However, individual tests fluctuate a bit, so detailed results will be published soon.

Coming soon....

Iyonix USB2

Iyonix 1.1

A9 Home 1.1

Copy 10MB file to 128MB pen drive

6.98 secs

Copy 10MB file from 128MB pen drive

6.46 secs

Copy 10MB file to Nokia mobile phone

26.9 secs

Copy 10MB file from Nokia mobile phone

-

Copy 10MB file to Sony mobile phone

25.68 secs

Copy 10MB file from Sony mobile phone

24.19 secs

Copy 37 images from Olympus camera, totalling 58MB

34.93 secs

N.B. A 4000KB wimp slot was used for the copying data tests.

Items used for testing purposes:-

128MB pen disc

Nokia mobile phone with 2GB micro SD card

Sony Ericsson mobile phone

Unfortunately, the A9 seems to be very unreliable on accessing USB pendrives, so testing is currently suspended until after the RISC OS Midlands Show on 1st Dec 2007. A previously reliable pen disc is now coming up with the following filer display:-

Unfortunately, this effect - misreading the directory information - is only too common on the A9 and makes using pen discs very hit and miss. :-(

Test Program

My !USBtest program performs the following tasks:-

Create a single 10MB file

Creates ten 1MB files

Creates 1000 10KB files

Creates 1000 1KB files

Reloads one 10MB file

Reloads ten 1MB files

Reloads 1000 10KB files

Reloads 1000 1KB files

Deletes one 10MB file

Deletes ten 1MB files

Deletes 1000 10KB files

Deletes 1000 1KB files

It performs these tests on data created within a 'TestDir' directory within the actual !USBtest application. After completion a table of timings an average data transfer results are written to the file !USBtest.results and also opened on screen.

WARNING Depending upon the speed of the filing system you've copied !USBtest to, running the tests can take a very long time, maybe up to two hours. Bear this in mind, before you start the testing, as the machine cannot be used whilst testing is taking place.

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